Reviewing Care

Reviewing the care that you provide for patients/clients is an essential part of your work that helps to ensure that the care provides is safe, effective, person centred.

This section will help you to focus upon the skills, knowledge and attitudes you need to successfully evaluate and review care.

Local evaluation of care

This activity should be spread throughout your time in this clinical area and it should also run in tandem with the activities in many of the other sections in this unit. Review the activities you have already completed and where the information gathered can be reused here.

In collaboration with your mentor, identify how care is evaluated and what is currently recorded in your work setting at the following levels:

area or department level

for specific patient/client groups

multi-professional or multiagency level

With your mentor, agree where you can take on a role in reviewing and evaluating the care provided. This will help you to build your confidence and competence and will help embed this activity in your clinical practice.

Depending on your role and work setting it may be relevant for you to consider information about a wide range of aspects of care e.g. treatment targets, patient/client experiences, infection rates, discharge data.

Social networking

There will be good examples of reviewing care that you have found that you can share with other newly qualified practitioners across NHSScotland. Equally, there may be examples where lessons could be learned from what other practitioners have done.

Use the social networking facility to share and learn about reviewing care.

Patient stories

Feedback from individual patients about their experience of care is a valuable tool that can help you develop the skills and knowledge that help you to take into account patient/client's own views of their needs - including their beliefs and attitudes.

Choose a patient, client or carer with whom you have worked fairly closely and either:

ask them about their experiences of their care

ask a colleague to do this to get an less biased account of their experiences

Find out about their satisfaction with the outcome of their care and how they feel about the way this was achieved. For example, ask about:

the communication and information they received

their experiences of receiving care from a range of different health and social care professionals much they were involved in the decision-making about their care

Areas where you and the team are performing well or where the service could be improved may emerge and you should feed this information back to your team colleagues.

Portfolio – Evaluating care

Reflecting on the activities you have completed, identify the evaluation skills that you require to develop in order for you to carry out your post safely, effectively and with a person centred ethos.

With your NHS KSF reviewer agree your Personal Development Plan for the next 6 months and decide on dates for reviewing your progress in this area with your mentor. Also add an alert to your Flying Start portfolio and /or make a date in your diary to revisit Reviewing Care.